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Healing
In the 25 years after Monterey, the Cynics and the True Believers kept digging deeper trenches. The businessmen became pornographers, while some of the world’s most passionate music fans became aesthetes or neurasthenics, adrift in doubt and detail rather than big musical ideas.
It wasn’t until the ’90s that a few labels began to resolve these differences. A handful of indies began to develop responsible business practices just as they were flowering artistically – Sub Pop with ironic yet anti-intellectual rock from the Pacific Northwest (Nirvana, Soundgarden); Matador with sardonic, urbane cool (Pavement, Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo); and Touch and Go with terrifying Midwestern crunch (Slint, Big Black, Butthole Surfers). Today these are referred to in the trade as “core indies.”
One problem these labels faced was that their artists became wary when they succeeded on the indie level. Indeed, the very aesthetic of their art entailed built-in fail-safe mechanisms that prevented crossover. Indie rock stars were either aggressively amateurish (Liz Phair), overly self-conscious (Pavement), clinically self-destructive (Kurt Cobain) or downright hostile (Steve Albini from Big Black). Consider the ’90s pop music’s late existential period. Just as modern life seemed too complicated and difficult for the original existentialists, the stakes of modern pop seemed too high for these artists.
This takes us back to 1999. Relations across the Great Schism were as tense as ever. The True Believers were setting up their own network of events (ATP, Coachella) to avoid the wider marketplace, the Cynics were inventing new trophies like the Diamond to pat themselves on the back for their successes. Napster came along and changed everything. Suddenly, cynical businessmen couldn’t get their hits, and their trophies were useless; the indie-rock True Believers had their doubts about the market confirmed by the larger populace, and sensed an opportunity. Since 1999, we haven’t heard nearly as much about “indie cred” as we once did, in part because underground cliquishness and mainstream avarice have become side issues to a hitmaking game that’s suddenly open to all comers.
The state of affairs we now find ourselves in isn’t so much an end of the music industry as it is a new beginning. Today’s indie labels can realistically expect to have the same financial roll if not the cultural impact that Sun, Chess, Atlantic and Specialty did in the 1950s. In short, 2004 is beginning to look like 1959 all over again.
